MySpace

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MySpace was a popular social networking site in the 2000s that accidentally allowed HTML and CSS in profile fields, unintentionally introducing millions to the ability to customize their profiles with old independent-web-like graphics, animations, and music, and unfortunately in 2019 lost all songs, photos, and videos that were uploaded to the site before 2015.

MySpace relaunched in 2013 as a music listening service with social aspects.

Criticism

2011 Founder stopped using

• https://www.facebook.com/myspacetompersonal/posts/273023736055760

  "[...] Why am I not on MySpace? Because, I left the company in early 2009, and like most of you, I don't like using it anymore.. not a fan of what the new folks have done with MySpace."

  Tom Anderson September 18, 2011

2019 Data loss

• 2019-03-18 The Guardian UK: Myspace loses all content uploaded before 2016 / Faulty server migration blamed for mass deletion of songs, photos and video

Articles

In chronological order, note the stark changes in headlines:

• 2006-04-18 Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace
• 2006-07-11 Mashable: MySpace, America's Number One

  MySpace is also winning market share from other social networks - in June, it captured 80% of social networking traffic, up from 76% in April. Facebook is second with 7.6%

• 2007-02-08 The Guardian: Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?
• 2018-04-11 TheOutline.com: MySpace Tom beat Facebook in the long run
• 2019-03-18 Mashable: MySpace lost 12 years of music and photos, leaving a sizable gap in social network history
• 2020-02-14 MySpace and the Coding Legacy it Left Behind

  … while rewriting MySpace, Harriman and Nguyen made a major mistake—they failed to block users from adding their own HTML and CSS to their profile pages. In Angwin’s telling, the team’s mistake was what “allowed users to build colorful backgrounds and wallpaper and load them onto their MySpace pages.

See Also

• https://twitter.com/raskmali/status/1029838010785980416

  "i say we go back to MySpace
  Tom wasn’t a nazi and he let us have a playslist on our profile"

  @raskmali August 15, 2018
• https://twitter.com/nougatmachine/status/1031347724405354498

  "Facebook won’t replace Myspace. “Like Myspace, but you can’t customize the theme and it only supports five colleges” is not a compelling sales pitch."

  @nougatmachine August 20, 2018
  • As a sarcastic response to: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1031319660401184769

    "Twitter-like clone services won’t replace Twitter. “Like Twitter, but worse, and nobody’s on it” is not a compelling sales pitch.
    
    The only way to marginalize Twitter is to direct our attention and publish our content to completely different types of platforms, like blogs."

    @marcoarment August 19, 2018
• Thread: https://twitter.com/ealshafei/status/1220106181777088512

  "Just remembering all those blog posts on Livejournal of people announcing that they're leaving MySpace after its acquisition by News Corp due to privacy concerns and ended up flocking to Facebook."

  @ealshafei January 22, 2020
• Remake: https://spacehey.com/
• ^ tech stack for that https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1332224148551118848
  • "For SpaceHey I'm using plain PHP, HTML and a lot of custom CSS. No frameworks whatsoever this time (except for jQuery which is needed to convert all time/date formats) :)" @AnTheMaker November 27, 2020
• 2021-04-29 The Verge: Myspace Tom got it right